Jealous Women At Risk

Neurotic Personality Doubles Alzheimer's Risk

HLM Anxious, Distressed Women

We know genetics drive personality but only now are we understanding how
personality drives disease.

Middle-aged women who’ve
spent their lives allowing their
emotions to be completely
swept up by the ebbs and flows
of living may well have suffer
an increased risk of developing
Alzheimer’s disease. Swedish
researchers’ results from a four
decade long study, published
in Neurology, indicate the
neurotic personality with
prolonged stress is the culprit.

Women with the highest
scores for being anxious,
jealous and moody—three
personality traits defined as
neurotic—doubled their risk
of developing the disease
compared to those who
scored lowest.

“No other study has shown
that [one style of] midlife
personality increased the risk
of Alzheimer’s disease over
a period of nearly 40 years,” Lena Johansson, a
researcher at University of Gothenburg and study
author, said.

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s, a memory
loss condition that affects language, judgment and
perception. Although 5.2 million people in the US
have been diagnosed, experts expect these numbers
to climb dramatically with the aging baby boomer
generation.

Are You Neurotic?

Studies show neurotic people
are overly sensitive and don’t do
well under stress, are likely to
interpret ordinary situations as
threatening and find hopelessness
even with minor frustration. Self
conscious and shy as well, the
neurotic personality has difficulty
controlling their responses and
are at higher risk for depression,
panic disorder, phobias and quite
possibly, based on the latest
research, Alzheimer’s disease.

Guilt, Anger, Envy, Worry

Averaging 46 when the study began in the 1960s,
one of the few to focus on women’s health, over the next
38 years, those women who
were most distressed, anxious,
jealous, moody, nervous, sleep
deprived, fearful, irritable
and tense also suffered more
guilt, anger, envy, worry and
depression.

Extroverts Win

While being introverted or
extroverted alone didn’t seem to
affect dementia risk, those study
participants who were both
distressed and withdrawn had
the highest risk of Alzheimer’s.
Some 25% of these women
succumbed to the disease while
only 13% who were outgoing
(extroverted) and not easily distressed did.

Neurosis Changes Hippocampus

The study authors say that the neurotic
personality, combined with stress, causes changes
in the hippocampus, the brain region that shows
the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

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